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Beating the Training Odds

"Checksheets" can help organize training materials, cut training time and increase student understanding and use.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Let's face it -- if you're responsible for training in a state or local agency of any size, the odds are against you.

New software and systems are introduced practically every week, agencies are almost constantly undergoing reorganization, and every level of government is feeling the economic pinch while demands increase.

In this situation, more training department staff would seem imperative. But it is not unusual for one trainer to be responsible for 500 or more staff. In some cases, the ratio goes as high as one trainer for every 5,000 staff. Although these are better odds than you'll get in most lotteries, they're pretty lousy for someone trying to do a good job of training.

"By the time trainers are given the task of developing and delivering a training program on some new software for 500 or 1,000 staff, system implementation is only a few weeks away, the documentation still isn't finished and there's little to no time allocated to train," said Ingrid Gudenas, president of Applied Scholastics Inc. (APS) of Northern California. "One-on-one training is out of the question and outside consultant trainers can be prohibitively expensive. Besides, no expertise is left in the agency when the outside consultant walks out the door. Even when things aren't quite this bad, we all know who bears the brunt of any problems when users don't know how to use a new system once it goes live."

Gudenas has worked in the training field for 19 years, and for the last 14 years has headed the San Francisco branch of APS, a Los Angeles-based education and training organization with offices around the country. APS is using a new approach to training called "100% Proficiency Training," featuring "checksheets" -- a list of theoretical and practical application steps a student needs to accomplish to achieve 100 percent proficiency.

SANTA CLARA COUNTY
Wendy Maracchini, a departmental information systems specialist in Santa Clara County, Calif., is responsible -- with her three staff -- for all training on the county's Criminal Justice Information Control (CJIC) system.

Over 5,000 people access the system from 40 different local, state and federal agencies using a variety of hardware -- totaling more than 150,000 accesses per day. Some users have dumb terminals, others have direct access to the database from PCs. On top of that, they're responsible for quality assurance for the 24 programmers who work on the more than 650 programs that make up the system, and they serve as business analysts for Joint Application Development (JAD) projects.

Despite this load, Maracchini's group completely revamped their training materials about two years ago, when a new computer system was introduced. Because of this groundwork, they had what they felt was a good set of resources, including context-sensitive online help.

"Our training materials were basically very good," said Maracchini, "and we'd gone to a 'train the trainer' approach a long time ago. We had about 123 part-time trainers. But we did a poll a year after implementation and found out that users weren't even getting the information into their hands."

At her quarterly meetings for trainers, she found almost everyone faced the same three problems. First, most didn't know what they were supposed to do and weren't even sure of their own knowledge. Second, they were given little time to train users. None of the trainers were full-time -- all had other jobs and were supposed to perform their training duties "on the side." Finally, some agencies, especially federal agencies such as the FBI and CIA, had only one computer terminal linked into CJIC, so no one could use the system for investigations when it was being used for training.

To address these problems, Maracchini and her staff took a week-long course at APS on how to design and write checksheets.

"We learned how to write checksheets and wrote about 23 checksheets in that week of training," said Maracchini. "We covered our entire introductory course, plus some advanced ones. We found it easy to write checksheets based on the materials we already had. Sometimes we found we'd had things out of sequence, but by and large we were well prepared."

Gudenas said it's fairly common to find that companies already have more than enough educational material to instruct staff, or they know where to get it. The more usual problem is finding a way to quickly and effectively deliver the information so it is understood and, more importantly, applied.

Having completed the checksheet training, Maracchini was convinced that introducing the new approach would address her trainers' three common problems.

"We'll roll out the checksheets to our training coordinators first," said Maracchini. "Previously, I never knew how much my training coordinators knew, but this will address that problem. Once they've learned the system themselves, the checksheets will help address the second issue, because they will be able to have several people doing checksheets at the same time without requiring as much trainer time. The training coordinator will only be needed when the trainee has to be checked out."

Maracchini anticipates that the checksheets will also help resolve the third issue: not enough on-location hardware resources for training purposes. Maracchini has several labs that can be used for off-site training, but in the past, scheduling was a constant problem. It was difficult to find a group of 10 or 12 people who all needed the same training and who could be scheduled together with a trainer. Under the checksheet method, labs can be filled with students who each work on a different checksheet, all supervised by one trainer.

Maracchini is hoping the checksheet method will help her reclaim trainer time in other ways too. "One remarkable thing we've discovered is that as you increase the effectiveness of the training, you also reduce the time it takes," said Gudenas. "In most cases, 100% Proficiency Training has cut training time in half. In one outstanding case for General Motors, a training program on computer-aided design went from 52 weeks to six weeks or less."

CONTRA COSTA COUNTY
Peter Harris is a social worker
who inherited the position of training coordinator for the Child Welfare Services/Case Management System for California's Contra Costa County Social Services. He faced the task of training a largely computer illiterate group of social workers on an extremely complex system.

"We have a brand new statewide child welfare services database and record-keeping system and case management system," said Harris. "It's a huge system -- about 700 screens and approximately 5,000 business rules."

Unfortunately, in his case the existing educational materials were inadequate and there were no other resources. Harris has had to spend hundreds of hours understanding the system and writing or rewriting materials, just to get to the point of writing checksheets for others. Still, knowing the checksheet methodology seemed to help focus his materials development.

"Given the magnitude of how much we had to teach, the checksheet method was even more necessary," said Harris. "The amount of material we had to cover, the number of students we were teaching and the pace at which we were moving forward from one training session to the next really made it necessary to use a structured, guided, standardized teaching approach."

Harris has found that even though checksheets have standardized results and approach, they accommodate differences in student pace. Some trainees have finished lessons in as little as an hour, where others take the full three hours allocated. In a few cases, a student didn't finished within the three hours, and simply took the checksheet back to their workstation to finish up.

"Students have also been able to come to the computer lab during non-teaching times. That's one of the beauties of the checksheet -- they can do it at their own pace, at their own time. They're not limited to doing it during the formal training times," Harris said.

According to Gudenas, APS' week-long course, which is based on the education methods of best-selling American author and humanitarian L. Ron Hubbard, covers how to properly structure a checksheet and provides an opportunity to write checksheets for use in the trainer's agency. Checksheets are part of Hubbard's popular Study Technology, a body of work which describes the fundamental barriers to study and ways to overcome those barriers.

AIR RESOURCES BOARD
Joan Winter, an associate systems information analyst for the California Air Resources Board, began using checksheets to train the board's staff on a new office automation system about a year ago and has had solid results.

"I looked at how they did with the checksheet process as opposed to classroom and hands-on method," said Winter, "and they did better with the checksheet." In the traditional setting, she got a respectable 80 percent rating from students. With the checksheets, that jumped to 92 percent.

"We are continuing to use the checksheet as new employees come on board," said Winters. "I get notes from people asking me to send the materials because they have a new employee. I send the materials, and so far haven't gotten a call from anyone needing help."

"One of the great advantages of Hubbard's 100% Proficiency approach is the way it can 'multiply' trainer resources," said Bernard Percy, an author, educator, industrial training consultant and spokesman for Applied Scholastics. "Once a checksheet is finalized, it can be used with many students over a period of months or years with little to no change."

CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL
Don Johnston, a programmer analyst with the California Highway Patrol, coordinated staff training on a new inspection system developed
by his in-house team. The system is being installed in the state's 15 inspection facilities and he, too, implemented the checksheet-based training about a year ago.

"The feedback has only gotten better," Johnston said. "So far, 98 percent of the people who have done the training agree or strongly agree with the statement that the 'checksheet was a good tool to help me through the course.' Ninety-four percent agree or strongly agree that they 'have a thorough understanding of the basics' of the system they were trained on -- and no one disagreed."

Perhaps more telling is that Johnston hasn't received a single request for retraining. "One of the remarkable aspects of the checksheet technology is that it simplifies the educational process," said Percy. "But don't mistake simplicity of process for triteness of approach. There are important subtleties involved in writing a checksheet that will bring a broad range of students up to proficiency. The checksheet methodology is based on a fundamental understanding of learning and the barriers which can inhibit effective study."

Although agencies often overlook the expense connected with poorly done training, most trainers seem to understand instinctively how expensive not properly training their staff can be.

"However much agencies are paying for new technology," cautioned Gudenas, "if they're not also training their people efficiently, they should add a healthy percentage to the overall cost of the technology, because of the mistakes staff will make when they're not proficient with the system." Failures to train also show up in how people react to new software, she explained.

"Support people and trainers all know that when users are not well-trained, they blame the software and the people who brought it in. Effective training solves these problems. By helping users achieve proficiency with new software, errors are reduced, support costs go down and morale rises. The most brilliant new programs are of no use to anyone unless they are properly used."

In this era of restructuring and constantly changing technology, trainers are at a disadvantage. But by implementing the checksheet method, some trainers are dramatically improving their chances for success.

For more information, contact Applied Scholastics Inc. at 800/949-5035.

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